The Irish and Palestinian People: Kindred Spirits United Through Suffering

Forgive me, I’m human too!

God bless the balladeers of that Emerald Isle, they sang happy, funny and sad, they wrote down the worst of their 700-years-worth of experiences under the English boot in flowing simple rhyme that appeared to the enemy but mere harmless entertainment for inebriates, but they are so much more. Their truth echoes across the ages. After a week of disappointments from South Lebanon to Gaza and the West Bank and an ever smiling Netanyahu polluting my TV screen, I just switched off. I took my worry beads and my phone as the sun was just setting and sat on the veranda. The cool breeze and the sky’s reddish bluish tint allowed a flood of repressed emotions and deep feelings to emerge and come to the surface. I found my tears just ran free along my cheeks and I let them.

 

We are damaged goods, the Irish too. The racialist ideas of the 19^th century saw rational English academics subscribe to ideas that today would be shunned as unscientific and perverse, ideas that reduced an entire nation, the Irish Nation to one of filthy savages to be portrayed in the English Press of the time as monkeys bearing spears. This dehumanization of “the other”, allowed the English to perpetuate and justify the oppression and neglect of an occupied people, and should these “savages” decide to fight back to liberate themselves from English colonization, their uprising would be brutally and violently put down and no one would cry out “stop, in the name of god, stop” for they are savages and hard justice is their just desert. Who is the savage and who is the master race? Sometimes I wonder if Shaw and Shakespeare met, would they have seen the other as monkey or oppressor too?

 

So, I take solace in knowing that the Irish experience means we Palestinians are in good company, that we aren’t alone in our suffering, although separated by time but bearing the same scars. No wonder Irish and Palestinian find common cause. In 1850, many a weeping Irish mother holding her half-starved babies to her breast unable to feed them during the great famine can sympathize with a weeping Gazan mother holding her half-starved babies to her breasts sitting in the ruins of her home unable to feed them. So can the Irish father in chains in the hold of a prison ship headed to Australia, he too can sympathize with a Gazan father held hostage in an Israeli prison. Ireland’s honorable stand with the rights of the Palestinian people and against the genocide committed by the Israeli state is both commendable and deeply appreciated by my people. From the heart, to Ireland with love and respect.

 

When Galant called Palestinians in Gaza “human animals”, he was merely echoing mainstream views in Israel. No Israeli thinks a Palestinian is their equal, few think we are human, and none of course believe we deserve to get our stolen land back. Have you heard of a thief giving back what he stole? No, it never happens. But there are Israelis with some modicum of human feeling who express deep sorrow at the huge loss of civilian life in Gaza, and blame Netanyahu for the war he started and can’t seem to be able to finish. Sure, these Israelis would rather the Palestinians just pack their things quietly and leave in the dead of night leaving the keys to their home under the doormat so the mentally limited Israeli settler can find the keys easily the next day and move in without any trouble.

 

The other day I watched a news report about Israeli settlers in the West Bank, essentially, Israelis who came from say New York to a new country, say Israel, decide to leave again and go to another country: the West Bank, recognized in the Oslo Accords as Palestinian territory. It sounds obscene to us outsiders, but the incentives given to settlers to attract them to settle in the midst of people who hate them, are huge, which makes moving to a settlement hard to turn down.

 

Settlers live in spacious compounds, each villa has a pool and each area has a park and a school and a supermarket and a pharmacy all within a massive compound. They are heavily guarded 24/7 and I bet inside those settlements crime is low if nonexistent, apart that is from the major crime, the elephant in the room, the blatant theft of Palestinian land. So, I don’t blame individual settlers, and as for Israeli society at large, they are not shown the horrific images coming from Gaza that we get to see on Al Jazeera and Al Mayadeen on a daily basis. So, for many Israelis, unless a katyusha rocket lands in their living room, the war is a faraway thing that does not concern them, unless they are conscripted or called out of the reserves to active service on the Gaza front.

 

So I sat watching the rose and orange tinted sky listening to ballad after ballad feeling a lot of self-pity, a lot of anger, and wondering where god is and why he hides himself from us.